is that good use-use which is reputable, national, and present, has consented that it shall do so. It is more than worth while, however, it is absolutely necessary, to keep this fact in mind. For since, generally speaking, there is no other relation between the sound we utter and the idea we wish to convey than that a great many other people have previously used the same sound for the same purpose, it follows that if for any reason we depart from the general practice of the people we address, we run into danger, if not into the certainty of exerting ourselves to no purpose whatever. I remember having once waked up in a Spanish railway-carriage to find myself alone on a side track near the foot of the Sierra Morena, over which the rest of the train had proceeded an hour or two before. I am unfortunate enough to know nothing whatever of the Spanish language. The twelve hours of misadventure which followed my waking were immensely complicated by the fact that I had no idea of what notions the kindly disposed inhabitants of Estremadura attached to the vocal sounds they amiably uttered; nor had they any of the usage prevalent in the more civilized parts of North America. And a very curious fact was that the interpreter on whom we ultimately fell back was a native of the place who had the misfortune to be deaf and dumb. The language of sign has no nationality.

Of course a dangerous practice is not necessarily fatal. You may go into action without getting shot; you may ride a bucking horse without breaking your

neck; you may write or utter a word sanctioned by no respectable usage whatever without being incomprehensible, - vamose, for example, absquatulate, enthuse, walkist. But to go no farther than a play that all of us have read, what does Hamlet mean by two phrases to be found in every text? When Ophelia asks him what his play means, he answers, "This is miching mallecho; it means mischief;" and when, somewhat earlier, his friends are trying to prevent his following the ghost, he says, " By Heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me." Now, I am informed that in certain parts of New England the word meaching is still in use, to express some sly line of conduct or other observable in dogs. I never heard it; I do not know exactly what line of conduct it describes. What mallecho may mean, except that it looks Spanish, and that the Latin root mal means bad, and has given rise to a great many names for bad things in modern languages, I have no idea at all. English it certainly is not, any more than miching mallecho is comprehensible without considerable commentary, much of which is concerned with the question of whether the whole trouble may not be a printer's error. turn to the second phrase, we all use the word let; roughly speaking, it means to allow, to permit: you let a child sit up past bedtime. But what sense is there in Hamlet's threatening to make a ghost of whoever lets him follow the ghost- which is exactly what he is trying to do? As a matter of fact, the good use of Shakspere's time attached to the word let the

Το

meaning that we express by the words check or prevent, a meaning preserved nowadays only in the somewhat rare idiom "without let or hindrance." Obviously, neither of Hamlet's words is of any particular use to a man who wishes to convey an idea to another in the year of grace 1891.

I chose these simple and very palpable examples of words that answer no purpose nowadays because they show very clearly the two grounds, and the only two, on which we are safe in declaring a word unfit for use. To English-speaking people miching may once have meant something; at present, to most English-speaking people it certainly means nothing whatever; to most English-speaking people, I incline to think, mallecho has never meant anything at all. In other words, neither miching nor mallecho is at this moment in the English language. Let, on the other hand, is undoubtedly in the language; but at this moment it means not what Hamlet meant by it, but precisely the reverse. To use the technical terms of Rhetoric, miching and mallecho, words not in the language, are now Barbarisms; let, a word in the language, but a word to which good use gives a different meaning from that for which it is employed, is now an Impropriety. All offences against good use in our choice of words are either Barbarisms or Improprieties. It is worth while, then, to devote a few minutes to each class.

For just here come a great part of the questions about style which puzzle unpractised writers and add

discomfort to a chair of Rhetoric. Is this word or that admissible? they ask us, day after day. Is it a Barbarism, we ask ourselves, or an Impropriety? If neither, then it is admissible.

Comparatively speaking, Barbarisms are not very common. Obsolete words, such as Hamlet's miching mallecho, are obsolete just because, for one reason or another, people have stopped using them. For this very reason, people who write nowadays do not know them by sight and sound; and there is little danger of falling into any sin from temptation to which circumstances free you. Foreign words, on the other hand, are more insidious. To many minds haut-ton says something far more significant than fashion, something which I found expressed in Portugal, some years ago, by a mysterious phrase which the Portuguese pronounced ig-leaf, a perfect rhyme with fig-leaf; they spelled it, I discovered later, high-life, and believed it very choice English. The truth is that novelty of expression frequently masks commonplace. A little learning is very dangerous to vocabulary; but a very little good sense will minimize the danger.

"And when that he wel drunken had the win,

Then would he speken no word but Latin; "

but when the ecclesiastic was sober, he could discourse in very rational English.

Brand-new words, like foreign ones, are insidious for much the same reason: they conceal for ♫ moment the triteness of the idea they stand for. Slang

changes a good deal faster than the manners and customs of mankind. Stale stories existed long before chestnuts, and have already survived them a year or two. Now, there is, I conceive, just one excuse for a brand-new word; namely, a brand-new idea. When telephones were invented we needed a vocabulary to fit the facts, and straightway introduced one. When Ericsson gave us a new kind of war-ship, the accident of its name gave us the new term monitor, which has lasted. Copperhead was a good word five and twenty years ago; so was Mugwump when certain of our fellow-citizens refused to vote for Mr. Blaine; but as politics have changed, Copperheads and Mugwumps are becoming, save to historical scholars, terms as mysterious as to young people nowadays is the term. waterfall, which was applied to those bunches of hair that dangled at the necks of pretty girls in President Lincoln's time. But Whig and Tory lived for a century and more; so perhaps will Republican and Democrat. And curls and skirts and wigs are perennial; but periwigs are no more. Perhaps no phase of barbarism is more palpable and more provoking than the pedantic trick of spelling old names in new ways: why we say Alsace and Bavaria and Mark Antony, why we do not say Homeros and Roma and Brute, I do not know; but I know that we do not. And I know that there are few more unidiomatic absurdities than those of the gentlemen who insist on spelling Alfred Aelfred, and Virgil with an e, and otherwise on impairing that irrational, spontaneous variety which